Back When

Thirty Years Ago On March 10, 1912, 5000 people gathered in front of the San Diego city jail at Broadway and Front Street to demand an end to the ban on public speaking. The police called in the fire department to disperse the crowd with 150-pound pressure hoses. "My cousins were very interested in the Wobbly activity here in San Diego and after the war when I went into the fire department they took pleasure in telling me what happened here," said Bert Shanklund, 87, retired San Diego fireman.

"My older brother Clement rode the rails clear down from Montana to be parta' that fight," recalls "Codger" Bill Lewis, 77. "When he finally got back some months later, he said that what the police and vigilantes did in San Diego was the worst head busting he'd ever seen. They kilt two Wobs and ya' don't know how many more bodies they mighta' dumped in the desert." -- "HOW SAN DIEGO TOOK CARE OF ITS WOBBLIES,"David Helvarg, March 10, 1977

Twenty-Five Years Ago Robert O. Peterson, [f]ounder of the Jack-in-the Box restaurant chain...converted the building from a furniture factory to executive offices for himself and his wife, former city councilwoman Maureen O'Connor. So it came as some surprise when Peterson recently allowed his building's carefully tended curtain of anonymity to be lifted a bit by permitting Mayor Wilson to move his U.S. Senate campaign headquarters into the structure. -- CITY LIGHTS: "BUT NO LOUD SPEECHES AFTER TEN," Matt Potter, March 11, 1982

Twenty Years Ago Men, read no further. This story contains things you don't understand, things you probably don't care about anyway. The heaviness of face cream has never been a big concern of yours. Coating one's face with walnut shells seems like a strange thing to do. Spending half an hour at a cosmetic counter is incomprehensible and, if you happen to be on the waiting end, intolerable. You have never experienced the thrill of using a virgin tube of lipstick, nor do you expect to. -- "THERE'S A FACE FOR US!" Brae Canlen, March 12, 1987

Fifteen Years Ago "In rock portage, trainees have to haul their rubber boats along the top of the boulders that form the Hotel Del breakwater. When they get to the end of the breakwater, they have to launch into the surf. And when those waves build to 10 or 12 feet, crashing right on the rocks, it's just about impossible to complete the mission. That's when people start getting hurt." -- "GOON SQUAD IN HELL WEEK," Bill Salisbury, March 12, 1992

Ten Years Ago When the Polish government called [Czeslaw Milosz] back to Poland, he defected. "I knew," he would later say, "that my country was becoming the province of an empire."[Thomas Merton's] autobiographical bestseller, The Seven Storey Mountain, was published in 1948 and made Merton's name known worldwide.

Milosz's letters to Merton were stored in the Merton archives in Kentucky.... Milosz visited Claremont several months after Faggen first read the letters. Faggen said to Milosz, "I really think these letters ought to be published," to which Milosz replied, "Well, maybe."

Milosz was seeking a defense, a Pascalian defense, of Christianity. One reason Milosz became interested in Merton was the hope that Merton would be the kind of man to provide this. But he didn't. -- READING: "STRIVING TOWARDS BEING: THE LETTERS OF THOMAS MERTON AND CZESLAW MILOSZ,"

Judith Moore, March 6, 1997

Five Years Ago In Diane's view, there's some truth to the idea that girls connect to horses because horses are like girls -- high-strung, emotional, intuitive -- but they have what girls and women lack: physical power. If a woman can control an enormous, strong-willed animal, she's not powerless. To gain that control, however, is not simple. -- "HORSES AND THEIR WOMEN," Laura McNeal, March 7, 2002